Comments and feedback

* Required

First name *

Last name *

eMail*

Share your thoughts with us, we appreciate receiving comments and constructive feedback about our news articles and ideas.

Please enter the verification code *

Subscribe to our RSS feed

Our objective: To design a printed mailer that was hard not to open and harder still to simply throw in the wastepaper basket once you had.

We recently created a mini brochure campaign targeting selected businesses that we thought would benefit directly from improved design in their online presentation and marketing.
We wanted to create a piece of print that was compact, tactile and mysterious enough to make the recipient want to investigate further, something that could not be immediately identified, something different.

1. Materials

This began with the envelope. A semi opaque design revealing just enough of the enclosure to envoke the question “what’s this?” A silky laminate on a heavyweight board makes the brochure enjoyable to hold once removed from the envelope, immediately conveying a feeling of quality and importance. The minimalist outer pages give very little away and are designed to convey only branding and a simple message that invites further investigation.

2. Method

Of course once opened the purpose becomes obvious and the content is judged along with the the hundreds of other sales messages that the average person receives during the course of their working day. If the brochure makes it this far however, it has already succeeded where so many fail. It has accomplished it’s task, through being opened and enjoying five to ten glorious seconds whilst it’s message is visually scanned, retained (fingers crossed) and it’s call to action acknowledged.

3. Results

The reader at this point decides upon our little brochure’s fate; a friendly desktop where it may be picked up and read once more? or the dark recesses of the bin with all the the other pizza type flyers? If the compact size, silky laminate, heavyweight board and slick minimalist outer pages have done their job, it might be spared the fate of most of it’s companions from that mornings post bag, along with the thought, “I’ll hang on to this, might be worth taking a look at their site later.”

4. Conclusion (to date)

This experiment in mail based promotion is ongoing (September 2011) but has already provided us with a number of valuable enquiries and two new clients which alone more justifies the expense. Print nowadays has to play second fiddle to the web in most areas of promotion, but the web lacks that ‘touchy feely’ quality that printed materials can offer as well as providing a welcome relief to staring at a screen. It will be interesting to see the final results in a couple of months time and whether our mini campaign has managed to keep itself on the desktop and out of the wastepaper basket.
Currently we would have to say… so far so good.

If you are interested in producing something similar for your business please contact us on 01892 704270 

If you have received one of our mini brochures we would love to hear your thoughts on it’s effectiveness.